Helen Goulden has recently found herself cast as one of the leading decision-makers in a wide movement in the UK to inspire more people to give more time, money and expertise to good causes, and to help make giving a cultural norm.

The director of Nesta's Public Services Lab is responsible for the Innovation in Giving Fund - a £10m fund launched in September 2011 by Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society, as part of a £34m package to increase levels of giving.

So far two strands of the fund have been launched. Firstly a call for 'game-changing innovations', which was open to ideas from all sectors and types of organisation to increase the giving and exchange of time, assets, skills, resources and money. And secondly the Open Innovation Programme, which will support 28 medium-to-large charities to begin partnerships with existing giving innovations, and develop these ideas within their own organisation.

Goulden says one noticeable gap among the applications for the initial open call for ideas was that there were numerous applications from digital entrepreneurs, start ups, social enterprises, local authorities, and even from universities, but hardly any from charities.

"Of 450 applications, I think only one charity actually applied to the first round of funding," she says. "We were surprised."

She says feedback has shown that some small charities in particular might have been inhibited by the application process, which involved submitting a short video clip in which an organisation needed to explain its idea. But she says, if this was the case, then that feedback in itself was interesting.

"If you look at the rise of crowdfunding sites and the ways in which people are fundraising now, it is increasingly moving towards involving rich media," she says. "So it's something that we've taken away as a learning to think about how we can support the sector to develop those skills."

Although only two of the five planned strands of the fund have been launched so far, Goulden says she has already started to notice some strong themes emerging in today's giving environment.

One is the growing focus on developing innovative approaches to integrate giving more seamlessly into people's everyday lives. Goulden gives the examples of the Pennies Foundation, which allows people to top up a bill to the nearest pound, with the additional money going to charity, or the Good Gym, which enables people to combine exercise with volunteering.

There are also ideas, she says, to potentially try to use Oyster cards for giving at tube stations, instead of asking people to give cash to collections tins, when often people do not have cash readily available.

"It's about transactions that don't require much thought and are quite easy to do," she says. "There's one question to consider with this trend though: how tolerant is the general public of being consistently and persistently asked to give small amounts?"

Another theme that Goulden has watched grow it reciprocal giving. "We see a load of ideas that focus on offering rewards or incentives that reciprocate for your social action," she says. "It's a little bit controversial because the longer term evidence suggests that extrinsic motivation or rewards actually erode your intrinsic motivation to do things. Although research is hugely polarised on that."

Goulden says that if charities were to look more carefully at rewards for giving, they should draw expertise from the commercial sector. "If you look in the commercial world and look at rewards, they are very closely aligned to loyalty,"

she says. "If you are accruing and building a relationship which is reciprocal, that feels like it has longevity, not like a campaign or a gimmick."

Goulden says one of the final three strands of the Innovation in Giving fund will focus on business giving. This strand, which is still being designed, will be launched in the Autumn, and is likely to focus on SMEs and family business giving, she says.

"We know there's lots of work that happens in the corporate sector, but it's not very visible, it's not really acknowledged and they can probably do more without doing very much," she says. "I think the first thing was to think about how we could make it more visible."

Another of the strands will focus on volunteer centres, says Goulden, given the "incredible challenges" many of them are facing.

"We are acknowledging that, yes, volunteer centres haven't quite got enough money to do what they used to do, and we want to ask: does that represent a decent opportunity to fundamentally re-examine what it is they do?" she says. "Whether new technology can help, or whether there are more compelling ways of developing volunteering opportunities that appeal to a much wider audience."

The final strand of the fund will focus on "mass civic particpations". Goulden says she is interested in how mass participation can be bought about, without it necessarily being linked to a unique event like the Olympics.

"We know that things like the Olympics volunteering, and giving to the Haiti appeal happen because they are unique or catastrophic events," she says. "If you take away that unique quality, galvanising the same amount of participation and enthusiasm is very, very hard. But there must be ways of getting more and more people together to do things in a common cause collectively."